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RE: Shocktober
Wow, what day that was. Despite being a lazy “lie in” kind of day, and following the second consecutive night of bad, restless sleep, I was up at 6 a.m. for a long(ish) run for which I had no motivation other than “whoa, wait a minute … you need to DO this thing… I can’t quite remember WHY, but it’s IMPORTANT man, so get your lazy arse OUT of bed and hit the road…. um, Jack.”
And so I found myself on the street, bereft of reason, sense or logic, just … running. I didn’t even know why, other than some strange sense of needing to DO this thing. I think that is why motivation is so hard… when you’re tired, I mean DOG-tired, it’s really, really hard to understand the reasons WHY you’re killing yourself like this. All you can do is hope that the reasons seep deep into your psyche and actually do enough to kick you out of bed in the morning and despite everything, actually get you onto the street before you have a reason to protest… or at least argue with yourself too much.
Anyway. Here I was. A quarter past six a.m. on a regular working day Tuesday, running down a particularly nasty stretch of busy road on an early-hours long run. It made no sense as far as my befuddled brain could tell. Even at that early hour the traffic was immense and the noise and fumes overwhelming on what is a very busy road prone to traffic jams of such magnitude that it is quite literally faster to jog along this road than to drive it… even at 6 a.m. Such is big city life. Go figure.
OK. Actually I kinda sorta DO know why I’m here, and it has nothing to do with training programmes. It has everything to do with my neighbour, Next Door Andy (to differentiate him from RC’s Swiss Andy a.k.a. El Gordo and P2P Hero Andy). Next Door Andy had run this course (at my suggestion) the previous weekend, but being sans-GPS had no idea of the distance. In my innocence I said I’d run the thing on Tuesday (this morning) with my trusty Garmin and let him know. Gad. Sad!
To be honest, the first 9 km were the worst. After that I went into a kind of naïve sensory deprivation mode, whereby I found a sort of solitary-confinement introspection and kidded myself that all was counter-intuitively OK. The truth was of course otherwise. It was also one of those days when the only other runners I encountered were young, fit, incredibly lean, ridiculously tall and totally not inclined to return my greetings or salutes. In fact the only one who did was being marshalled by a particularly demonic personal trainer who immediately admonished her for losing focus to return my shouted “good morning”. Woeful! It was as if I’d encountered some secret East German training camp from the cold war era. Oh well. I never could get the hang of Tuesdays.
Anyway, let’s cut the crap. Today I ran a hilly, nay very hilly 18.3 km in a respectable time (for me) despite the overwhelming desire to sleep in and the apparent unintentional wandering into some bizarre Stasi athletic camp. No, today was simply another “no excuses” day, which thankfully has become somewhat ingrained of late into the MLCMM being by the remarkable determination of other members here of the RC community and one or two others as well within my sphere of social intercourse. It’s fair to say that in recent times my motivation has come not from goal setting, but from watching others set their goals and then achieving them. Inspiring stuff! I love it. When you don’t have a real personal reason “why” (well, I do, but I seem to keep forgetting what it is, especially first thing in the morning), it seems you can always rely on others if only you take the time to look around.
Why is this so? Perhaps because when you can’t find personal motivation it’s in the efforts of others that you can often sense real purpose. You may not understand it exactly, but you “get” the underlying cause … the urge that drives them on. It’s innate and fundamental to our being. Primal, even. And that’s what got me out of bed this morning … not the love of running … not a slavish addiction to the training programme … but a keen sense of the primal urge to satisfy something deep within, and yet somehow undefinably basic to human survival.
Shit. I’m sounding… ridiculous. Sorry, but unlike others around these parts I’m definitely NOT on the wagon, and therefore prone to … gushing. Ness.
I think I’ll go and have a quiet cry in a corner somewhere. With an Islay malt. Or maybe a Rutherglen muscat. Mmmmmm… now we’re talking.
Struth. If not for running, I’d be dead (or at least my liver would). Probably that’s more true than I care to admit. Damn.
Genuinely Mid Life Crisis (Marathon) Man.
18.3km, 1:53:43, tough and hilly.
YTD 1,191.2km
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Shocktober
